Literature and Politics from a microcosm called Delaware. Here all the multifaceted players across the great capitalist contradiction are reduced to a few actors: a handful of banking and chemical oligarchs squatting in châteaux, a stable of artists downwind who either take inspiration for amnesia and roses or take a stand, challenging the living to repair a polluted world.

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In the The Wedgehorn Manifesto, Steven Leech advocates preserving the legacy of Delaware literature, especially that which was produced by Wilmington authors. It exposes the flaws in today’s environment and suggests remedies for a cultural revival.

Sunday, February 7, 2010

Following What Money There Is

In Delaware author Victor Thaddeus' unpublished novella "Leo Rex," from the late 1930s, there is buried in it the suggestion that there ought to be, and very well could be, a U. S. Department of Arts and Culture, which would enjoy equal status with the Departments of State, Treasury, Interior, Commerce, and War as part of the President's Cabinet. This was not a notion that Thaddeus held alone. Many, who, like Thaddeus, were members of the various Federal Arts, Writers’, Theater, and Musicians' Projects of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during FDR's Administration in the late 1930s, thought those projects might evolve into a new United States Department of Arts and Culture. After all, many developed countries have Ministries of Arts and Culture that serve in the highest echelons of government, including the former Soviet Union and Cuba. Why not in the United States, the most "developed" country on the planet?

While the FWP (Federal Writers' Project) did not accept works of fiction, Thaddeus' novella was accepted as a piece for a dramatic adaptation for the local Theater Project. All those in the various Projects, whether they painted murals, wrote, worked in the theater, or played a musical instrument, got paid for their work. It was a real living.

The various Projects never got the opportunity to evolve into a Department of Arts and Culture. The Second World War came along, supplanting the WPA and gobbling up a lot of budding artists, writers, and cultural workers into the Draft, and the idea of such a noble seat in the President's Cabinet evaporated.

After the War, soldiers came home war-weary to social problems endemic to peacetime conversion, to the launching of the "baby boom," and to a slowly growing social and political paranoia that would blossom into a Cold War that would bury any serious cultural endeavors in a heap of McCarthyite, HUAC-driven cultural conformity and emotional mass apathy. Television put people to sleep in what former FCC Chairman Newton Minow in 1961 would call a "vast wasteland." For many, Minow’s warning was a wake-up call to the plight of our country's cultural health.

In 1965 the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) was created by an act of Congress and in 1967 the Public Broadcasting Act was enacted, which established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The Public Broadcasting System (PBS) was founded in 1970. Finally, after nearly a quarter century of mind-numbing 1950s cultural vacuity, some sort of public funding for the arts was established. Though not on the scale that the WPA had funded and supported the arts, the establishment of these institutions did coincide with the cultural flowering of the counter-culture. The multiple events may have sent nascent right-wingers of the day into a lather.

The Roe v. Wade decision from the Supreme Court in 1973 provided the opening wedge issue that galvanized the right wing for the culture wars that have been raging ever since. Things sprung into high gear in 1981 when Ronald Reagan attempted to abolish the NEA, but it gave right wingers like the late Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina the claim that they didn't want their tax money paying for public programming of the kind or content they disapproved. Incrementally, they made enough reductions in public funding for public broadcasting to lead to the interminable fund-raisers being broadcast on public radio and television today which drive many viewers and listeners back to that vapid vast wasteland.

Funding for the arts is a different matter. According to my experience and from what I've observed at close range from other arts organizations, public funding provides only enough money to place an organization into a fund raising-mode, so that the organization is spending valuable time and effort raising the remainder of the funds needed to produce artwork. For individual artists, of whatever discipline, public funding is usually a pittance, even with the largest awards. And it has been my experience, regardless of the quality of the writing itself, that one must be careful of what one writes about. What it all means is that for the individual artist, keep that day job, and for arts organizations, be prepared to put some arts projects on the back burner in order to spend time and effort scrounging around for patronage. This is a far cry from the kind of funding and support established during the New Deal.

For funding of artists, writers, thespians, musicians, and composers, as well as for organizations of and for artists of all kinds, a Brand New Deal is needed; maybe even one which some conservatives in "red states" or under the spell of the "Tea Party" can accept for whatever positive cultural contribution they can make to their constituents. Regardless of whatever reaction might come from the reactionaries, might this be a relevant issue for all artists, writers and poets, thespians, and music makers to adopt and make an effort to achieve? Or might it be better to keep that day job and spend that spare time leftover from the creation of artwork to go around begging for patronage from the fat cats?

The only opportunity to read this work is to find the original manuscript. It is available, but it won't be easy. It's buried in the papers of the Delaware's Federal Writers' Project from the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which is archived at Special Collections in the University of Delaware Library. They did make a copy for me to use for my research, which I had to return because the mss is technically and legally their property, but they may have retained it as a separate entity. In whichever case Special Collections makes the mss available, you won't be able to take it from the library. You'll have to read it in Special Collections' reading room. The only saving grace with this final obstacle is that it is a novella, and relatively short, so it's possible to read the whole thing in one or two sittings, Good luck.

Thanks, Steven. What a seemingly unearthable document. I'm grateful that you've at least been able to air it out a little. Would love to carry on this conversation in email, but when I tried the address for Broken Turtle Books the mailbox was full. Is there another address I can reach you at? Depending on the content of Leo Rex, there is a little project I might like to start cooking and it would be great to be in touch.

All Delaware Authors

Broken Turtle Booklist is a catalogue of Delaware regional authors, local publishers, and literary communities operating in Delaware. The Booklist includes audio and video recordings of Delaware authors, as well as their major works. It provides easy links to Amazon, Paypal, or publishers for folks who want to buy. Each month, we will feature a selected work by a Delaware author.

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To get your free copy of Steven Leech's The Wedgehorn Manifesto, write us at publisher@brokenturtlebooks.com. Also, Leech is now making a number of his other works in new editions available in PDF format.

What others have been saying about The Wedgehorn Manifesto:

Leech's writer's voice is from the heart, carrying lots of knowledge without pretension. He has a poets's feel for the way words work, and a jounalist's sense of the significant. Wedgehorn Manifesto marks, I hope, a turning point in the effort to preserve from destruciton the habitat in our collective memory of the many talented story tellers, poets, picture makers, and musicians who helped make life bearable for innumerable ordinary folk, and in fact made possible the fine cuture of the luckier few.

-Jonathan Bragdon, Wilmington born artist now living in Amsterdam, Netherlands

The Wedgehorn Manifesto is a call to action, a demand, an impassioned plea for the recognition, respect, and support of Delaware's artistic cultural past, present and future.

-Pat gibbs, columnist, The Wilmington SPECTATOR

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Dreamstreets showcased progressive artists, photographers, and writers of the Delaware Valley from 1977 to 2006. A beautiful record of the most vital—if often marginalized—cultural productions of an era. Features two centuries of Delaware's literary heritage. Now includes audio and video files.